Police had to taser Michael L. Brea to subdue him before bringing him to a Brooklyn hospital with a guard.

Michael L. Brea, who has appeared on episodes of Ugly Betty and in Step-Up 3D, brutally murdered his mother with a Samurai sword while screaming biblical passages, police confirm.

Police were called to Brea's Brooklyn, New York apartment after neighbors heard screaming around 2:20 a.m. Tuesday morning.

"I hear the brother chasing her [his mother] through the house and he's just saying a bunch of [Bible] passages like, 'Repent, Repent, Repent,'" neighbor Gregory Clare told local television station WPIX 11 News. "I heard him chasing her through the house and I hear a loud scream and so I have my father call the cops, call 911."

Brea, who also appeared in Coke commercials, had decapitated and stabbed his mother, 55-year-old Yannick, multiple times. Police said he was emotionally disturbed and they had to taser him to subdue him. They described the apartment as “extremely bloody.” He was taken to Kings County Hospital with a police guard.

"I had just dozed off to go to sleep and then I woke up to somebody screaming," said Bernard Bent, another resident. "It sounded like a lady's voice and after a while I just didn't hear the woman's voice again."

Brea, who was described by neighbors as "quiet," was into martial arts. He has a twin brother, and also owned a Subway restaurant shop, giving away 300 sandwiches for free on Thanksgiving in 2008.

"I remember growing up and my mother was always feeding people who were less fortunate," Brea once told Haitian movie site BelFim.com. "My parents raised me to always share and to give charity in the name of God."

Police had to taser Michael L. Brea to subdue him before bringing him to a Brooklyn hospital with a guard.

Michael L. Brea, who has appeared on episodes of Ugly Betty and in Step-Up 3D, brutally murdered his mother with a Samurai sword while screaming biblical passages, police confirm.

Police were called to Brea's Brooklyn, New York apartment after neighbors heard screaming around 2:20 a.m. Tuesday morning.

"I hear the brother chasing her [his mother] through the house and he's just saying a bunch of [Bible] passages like, 'Repent, Repent, Repent,'" neighbor Gregory Clare told local television station WPIX 11 News. "I heard him chasing her through the house and I hear a loud scream and so I have my father call the cops, call 911."

Brea, who also appeared in Coke commercials, had decapitated and stabbed his mother, 55-year-old Yannick, multiple times. Police said he was emotionally disturbed and they had to taser him to subdue him. They described the apartment as “extremely bloody.” He was taken to Kings County Hospital with a police guard.

"I had just dozed off to go to sleep and then I woke up to somebody screaming," said Bernard Bent, another resident. "It sounded like a lady's voice and after a while I just didn't hear the woman's voice again."

Brea, who was described by neighbors as "quiet," was into martial arts. He has a twin brother, and also owned a Subway restaurant shop, giving away 300 sandwiches for free on Thanksgiving in 2008.

"I remember growing up and my mother was always feeding people who were less fortunate," Brea once told Haitian movie site BelFim.com. "My parents raised me to always share and to give charity in the name of God."

MONDAY, Nov. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Eating disorders have risen steadily in children and teens over the last few decades, with some of the sharpest increases occurring in boys and minority youths, according to a new report.

In one startling statistic cited in the report, an analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that hospitalizations for eating disorders jumped by 119 percent between 1999 and 2006 for kids younger than 12.

At the same time as severe cases of anorexia and bulimia have risen, so too have "partial-syndrome" eating disorders -- young people who have some, but not all, of the symptoms of an eating disorder. Athletes, including gymnasts and wrestlers, and performers, including dancers and models, may be particularly at risk, according to the report.

"We are seeing a lot more eating disorders than we used to and we are seeing it in people we didn't associate with eating disorders in the past -- a lot of boys, little kids, people of color and those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds," said report author Dr. David Rosen, a professor of pediatrics, internal medicine and psychiatry at University of Michigan. "The stereotype [patient] is of an affluent white girl of a certain age. We wanted people to understand eating disorders are equal-opportunity disorders."

The report is published in the December issue of Pediatrics.

While an estimated 0.5 percent of adolescent girls in the United States have anorexia and about 1 to 2 percent have bulimia, experts estimate that between 0.8 to 14 percent of Americans generally have at least some of the physical and psychological symptoms of an eating disorder, according to the report.

Boys now represent about 5 to 10 percent of those with eating disorders, although some research suggests that number may be even higher, said Lisa Lilenfeld, incoming president of the Eating Disorders Coalition for Research, Policy and Action in Washington, D.C.

Most studies that have been focused on prevalence were based on patients in treatment centers, who tended to be white females, Lilenfeld said. "That does not represent all of those who are suffering," she said. "It's hard to say if eating disorders are on the rise in males, or if we're just doing a better job of detecting it."

Rosen and his colleagues pored over more than 200 recent studies on eating disorders. While much is unknown about what triggers these conditions, experts now understand it takes more than media images of very thin women, although that's not to say those don't play a role, Rosen said.

Like other mental health problems and addictions, ranging from depression to anxiety disorder to alcoholism, family and twin studies have shown that eating disorders can run in families, indicating there's a strong genetic component, Rosen said.

"We used to think eating disorders were the consequences of bad family dynamics, that the media caused eating disorders or that individuals who had certain personality traits got eating disorders," Rosen said. "All of those can play a role, but it's just not that simple. All young women are exposed to the same media influences, but only a small percentage of them develop eating disorders. So what is different about those 1 percent that develop an eating disorder compared to the 99 percent who don't?"

At the same time as eating disorders have risen, the obesity epidemic has also exploded. Concerns about overweight and obese children have prompted some physicians to counsel their young patients about nutrition. That's an approach that can backfire when not handled correctly, however.

"There are lots of kids in my practice who say their eating disorder started when their family doctor told them, 'You could stand to lose a few pounds,'" Rosen said. "As physicians, we need to make sure our conversations are not inadvertently hurtful or impact their self esteem."

For people who are genetically vulnerable, dieting itself is a risk factor for eating disorders, while strict dieting is even a bigger risk, Lilenfeld said.

Parents and pediatricians should look for signs of eating disorders, including a child whose progress on growth charts suddenly changes, very restrictive eating, compulsive overexercising, making concerning statements about body image, vomiting, disappearing after meals or use of laxatives and diet pills.

Eating disorders, especially anorexia, can have long-term consequences for health, including leading to early osteoporosis and death.

"We know the sooner they get some evidence-based treatments, the better the outcome," Lilenfeld said.

"The good news is eating disorders can be 'cured' -- that is to say, the person isn't merely keeping the condition at bay but can actually get over it," Rosen said. With treatment and maturity, many kids move beyond the eating disorder.

"The conventional wisdom is eating disorders are incurable. You have them for life, you never get better and the best you can hope for is to keep it under control like alcoholism," Rosen said. "That's not the reality, particular for children and teenagers with eating disorders. The majority of children and adolescents get all better."

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more on eating disorders.

MESA, AZ - As thousands gather for the Christmas Lights ceremony at the Mesa Mormon Temple Friday night, a local gay-rights organization has plans for a suicide prevention outreach event.

Volunteers for the Phoenix Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Coalition for Mormon Action will gather at Pioneer Park, across the street from the temple and take to the public sidewalks around the temple at 5 p.m. to distribute outreach cards with the information for a suicide hotline.

Bobby Parker, a Mormon and leader of the Phoenix GLBT Coalition, said the group aims to make the Mormon community aware of both The Trevor Project Suicide Prevention National Hotline as well as Phoenix Affirmation , a local organization for gay Mormons.

According to Parker, 400,000 Mormons are Arizona residents and estimated that roughly 10 percent were gay or lesbian.

Arizona’s suicide rate is higher than the national average, Parker says.

The group will also gather at 6:30 p.m. to hear speeches from several people working to prevent suicides of homosexuals within the Mormon population.

Following the evenings speeches, attendees plan to stand around the temple with candles singing “Silent Night” before simultaneously blowing out the candles to represent the loss of the lives of those who have committed suicide.

Copyright 2010 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Editor's note: Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her latest book, "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s," will be published in January by Basic Books.

(CNN) -- According to a TIME/Pew research poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from just 28 percent in 1978.

In that same poll, only one in four unmarried Americans say they do not want to get married. And among currently married men and women, 80 percent say their marriage is as close as or closer than their parents' marriage.

These seemingly contradictory responses reflect the public's recognition of a new and complex reality. On the one hand, marriage as a voluntary relationship based on love and commitment is held in higher regard than ever, with more people saying that love is essential to marriage (Consider that in 1967, two-thirds of college women said they'd consider marrying a man they didn't love if he met other criteria, such as offering respectability and financial security.)

But as an institution that regulates people's lives, marriage is no longer the social and economic necessity it once was. People can construct successful lives outside marriage in ways that would have been very difficult to manage 50 years ago, and they have a far greater range of choices about whether to marry, when to marry, and how to organize their marriages.

This often makes them more cautious in committing to marriage and more picky about their partners than people were in the past.

In the 1950s, when half of all American women were already married in their teens, marriage was an almost mandatory first step toward adulthood. It was considered the best way to make a man grow up, and in an economy where steady jobs and rising real wages were widely available, that often worked.

For a woman, marriage was deemed the best investment she could make in her future, and in a world where even college-educated women earned less than men with a only a high school education, that often worked for her too.

Marriage was also supposed to be the only context in which people could regularly have sex or raise children. Divorced or unmarried men were routinely judged less qualified for bank loans or job promotions, sexually active single women were stigmatized, and out-of-wedlock children had few legal rights. Today, however, there are plenty of other ways to grow up, seek financial independence, and meet one's needs for companionship and sex. So what might have seemed a "good enough" reason to enter marriage in the past no longer seems sufficient to many people.

Marriage has become another step, perhaps even the final rather than the first step, in the transition to adulthood -- something many people will not even consider until they are very sure they are capable of taking their relationship to a higher plane.

Couples increasingly want to be certain, before they marry, that they can pay their bills, that neither party is burdened by debt, that each has a secure job or a set of skills attesting to their employability. Many are also conscious that as rigid gender roles erode, marriage demands more negotiation and relationship skills than in the past. They often want firsthand experience with how their partner will behave in an intimate relationship, which is why the majority of new marriages come after a period of cohabitation, according to census figures.

These higher expectations are good news for many marriages. People who can meet the high bar that most Americans now feel is appropriate for the transition to marriage -- people who delay marriage to get an education, who have accumulated a nest egg or established themselves in a secure line of work -- typically have higher quality marriages than other Americans, research shows, and their divorce rates have been falling for the past 25 years.

But these higher expectations pose difficulties for individuals with fewer interpersonal and material resources. Over the past 30 years, job opportunities and real wages have declined substantially for poorly educated men, making them less attractive marriage partners for women. When such men do find stable employment, they often tend to be more interested in a woman with good earnings prospects than someone they have to rescue from poverty.

Today, several studies have shown, economic instability is now more closely associated with marital distress than it used to be.

If a low-income woman finds a stable, employed partner, she will likely be better off by marrying. But if the man she marries loses his job or is less committed and responsible than she had hoped, she may end up worse off than before -- having to support a man who can't or won't pull his own weight.

So the widening economic gap between haves and have-nots that America has experienced in recent decades is increasingly reflected in a widening marriage gap as well. Today two-thirds of people with a college degree are married, compared with less than half of those with a high school degree or less.

Those who begin married life with the most emotional and material advantages reap the greatest gains in those same areas from marriage. The very people who would benefit most from having a reliable long-term partner are the ones least likely to be able to find such a partner or sustain such a relationship.

This is a troubling trend that deserves attention from policy-makers. But the problem does not lie in a lack of family values. The poor value marriage just as highly as anyone else, and they may value children even more. Unfortunately, they are now less and less likely to believe they will be able to live up to the high expectations of modern partnerships, even if they are in love.

There is no easy fix for this problem. But the good news is that families still matter to Americans, including those who are not married.

According to the Pew poll, 76 percent of Americans say family is the most important, meaningful part of their life. Seventy-five percent say they are "very satisfied" with their family life. And 85 percent say that the family they live in today, whatever its form, is as close as or closer than the family in which they grew up. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but that's comforting news.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephanie Coontz.